Karow, who previously was HLI’s Chief of Radiogenomics, will lead the company with Scott Sorensen, who was hired in March as the company’s chief technology officer. Sorensen will take on the duties of interim chief operations officer, HLI said Friday.

Privately held HLI uses advanced technologies to better diagnose and prevent disease, with the goal of extending the “healthspan,” the healthy part of the human lifespan. But the La Jolla company has had to cope with a string of high-profile departures and management instability in recent months.

The former chief operations officer, Saturnino “Nino” Fanlo, left the company earlier this year. Venter, a Human Longevity co-founder, had become CEO again in December. He replaced departed CEO Cynthia Collins, who had led the company for less than a year.

Fanlo left HLI in the spring. He had been accused of sexual harassment in a previous job, according to stories in the New York Times and other publications. Fanlo denied harassing women and said he respects them.

Venter announced his departure on May 24, using Twitter. He said he was leaving the company to return to the J. Craig Venter Institute, a non-profit he founded to explore the frontiers of life.

In their new positions, Karow and Sorenson are to work together to manage HLI’s businesss strategy, such as how to incorporate genomics machine learning and clinical imaging to present maximum value to customers and to science in general.

Before joining HLI, Karow had performed research and practiced medicine, at UC San Diego, UCLA and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Karow helped the company develop and expand its Health Nucleus, a testing center that provides customers very detailed readouts of their present health, potential for diseases later on, and strategies to preserve health. He has focused on key diseases that are major causes of premature death, including cancer, heart disease, metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases.

Karow, who was at UCSD just before joining HLI, said he came to appreciate the way the company melds health information from different sources, analyzing it with machine learning to develop greater precision in assessing health.

Karow said HLI was surprised when it began scanning apparently healthy volunteers that had incipient signs of heart or liver disease, or a tumor they weren’t aware of.

While genomic information gives a general guide to disease risk, the physical exams allow the risk to be much more precisely determined, Karow said.

“It's really the combination of whole body (imaging) and whole genome sequencing with its predictive capabilities that give you a full picture of your risk for chronic age-related disease,” Karow said.

Health Nucleus initially launched with a price of $25,000 per person, but the price, while still in the thousands, has come down substantially. Reduced costs of genome sequencing and imaging have lowered the cost to the point where Health Nucleus now charges $5,000.

But even that price is still too high to allow mass adoption, Karow said. That would require the price to drop below $1,000, something Karow said may be possible in a few years.

Sorensen was formerly chief technology officer of Ancestry.com, a family history and consumer genomics products company. He was hired in part to help with Health Nucleus, expanding its services to other locations and making its digital offerings more customer-friendly.

Sorensen said in a Friday interview that his work with data and genomics for tracing ancestry gave him an appreciation for what data tools could do for assessing and managing health.

Looking ahead, Karow said Health Nucleus is outgrowing its startup phase, and intends to scale its offerings, including establishing other Health Nucleus locations outside of the one in HLI headquarters. And to do that, the company is looking at raising more money, possibly in an initial public stock offering.

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Genetic analysis conducted on one Neanderthal woman who lived 52,000 years ago was published Oct. 5 in a report in the journal Science. (October 6, 2017)

Genetic analysis conducted on one Neanderthal woman who lived 52,000 years ago was published Oct. 5 in a report in the journal Science. (October 6, 2017)

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Genetic analysis conducted on one Neanderthal woman who lived 52,000 years ago was published Oct. 5 in a report in the journal Science. (October 6, 2017)

Genetic analysis conducted on one Neanderthal woman who lived 52,000 years ago was published Oct. 5 in a report in the journal Science. (October 6, 2017)

The Food and Drug Administration has launched a crackdown on clinics hawking stem cell treatments for a range of ailments. (September 1, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)

The Food and Drug Administration has launched a crackdown on clinics hawking stem cell treatments for a range of ailments. (September 1, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)

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Researchers used eggs from healthy females and the sperm of a man who carried a gene mutation that causes inherited hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. (Aug. 3, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)

Researchers used eggs from healthy females and the sperm of a man who carried a gene mutation that causes inherited hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. (Aug. 3, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)